The present invention relates in general to storage bins in instrument panels of automotive vehicles, and, more specifically, to a bin construction that enables the stiffness of the bin in response to crushing forces from an impact load to be easily adjusted to a desired stiffness without comprising the overall size, appearance, or performance of the main body of the bin.
A glove box storage bin is commonly installed in automotive vehicles by placing it in the instrument panel (i.e., dashboard) in front of the front passenger seat. Usually mounted to a hinged and latchable door, the bin is within easy reach of the vehicle occupants. Because of the placement immediately in front of a passenger locations, the design of a bin must take into account its interaction with passengers in the event of a vehicle crash.
Close proximity of the glove box to the knees of a passenger dictates that it have a low dynamic stiffness in order to achieve a desired level of knee impact safety. In particular, the stiffness should be low enough to permit the bin to begin to crush in response to knee impacts against the bin depending on the magnitude of the impact load force. In a typical design process, an approximate bin configuration is derived from a rough vehicle layout. A prototype part is fabricated and then tested under various impacts to determine whether the stiffness is within a desired range. Usually, multiple design iterations are required with an evolving shape to adjust the stiffness of the glove box until the target knee loads are achieved for the tested knee impacts. Some existing methods for tweaking a design to reduce stiffness in a particular design include removing or trimming support ribs, adding open slots through the walls of the bin, and reducing the wall thickness of the bin. These known tactics have had certain disadvantages such as warping or sagging of thin walls, undesirable aesthetic appearance of open slots, and the possibility of slots interfering with the bin contents or even the possibility of contents falling out through the slots.